.NET Conf Focus on Windows

>> I'm having some deja vu because it seems like we had a.NET conference a couple of months ago, but we're having another one that's all about Windows. Join me with Beth Massi as we learn more about the upcoming.NET Conference on this episode of Visual Studio Toolbox. [MUSIC] >> Hey, everyone welcome to another episode of Visual Studio Toolbox. I'm your host, Leslie Richardson. Today I'm joined by Beth Massi, who is a Product Marketing Manager on the.NET team. Welcome Beth. >> Hey, thanks for having me, Leslie, I appreciate it. >> Sweet. Nice to have you here. It's always cool that I'm here. I'm the host, so what do you know? Word on the street, is that there is a conference coming up that's.Net Conf. But didn't we just have.Net Conf a couple of months ago. What's going on? >> That's right, we have it every year, the main three day event, happens every year and from now on it'll happen every November when we launch a new version of.NET. It happened with.NET Core 3 were released in September 2019. But then we went on the every November release train. Now we're going to have it every November. Last November, you're right, in 2020, we had done it five. That happens every year and we've been doing it for a long time. It started out in the community. Javier Lozano is still on the Planning Team. He started it ten years ago. Last one was the ten year anniversary of the main event. Now what we started last year though, is these series of smaller events that are just one day. The main event has an open call for content and we run it like a real conference basically, except it's always been a virtual conference. It's a little easier for us to adjust to this pandemic situation to be honest, we were pretty set up for that. But we started a series of smaller events actually before the pandemic hit. It was started in January last year, we did a Focus on Blazer. It was a test to just say, hey let's invite some of the community experts and get some product team members together for just a one day thing. We had no idea how it would perform or what it would do. Well, it turned out it was an actually very successful event. We had a lot of viewers. We're like, "Hey, this is an easier version, a little scaled down version of.NET Conf." People understand what.NET Conf is about, so we're like let's call it Focus on- something. Because you can do anything with.NET so it's nice to be able to focus on a topic for the day. We actually started that last year, we had Focus on Blazer in January, it was on January 14th. I remember we flew up there and it snowed in. We got completely snowed in to the studio. We ended up bringing up all the speaker. Nobody could come in the studio at all so we had to bring all the speakers remote. We really only had half the speakers remote and then the product team members coming in the studio. Well, they couldn't even do that. We literally were like, okay, we're going to have to go pick up the crew from their house in an SUV and bring them. Then we planned one from March and that was Focus on Xamarin. We were doing all the mobile development with Xamarin. That one was March 23rd, which was actually one day before Governor Inslee, the governor of Washington State shut down the state because of the pandemic. >> That feels like an eternity ago. >> Yeah, it feels like an eternity ago, it was literally less than a year ago that that happened. We didn't plan on traveling because we knew this was going to happen. I ended up staying home. Javier, stayed home, Jeff stayed home, so we were all at home except that James Montemagno was the host and they did go into the studio. But we ended up calling everybody in remotely for that one, except we had a few like a skeleton crew. Then we did a third one and this is full blown into the pandemic. We did a third one on microservices in July, and that was our first real test run of everything in the Cloud. We basically built a studio in the Cloud. Instead of having these channel line studios, we created a big Azure VM running OBS. We actually still at that, we didn't use StreamYard. I think we were still using Skype to call people into it. But it ended up being a super successful event. We ran it through Learn TV. That one is probably our biggest event that we've done. They'd been successful. We've got another one coming up. We think we have streamlined the process, almost like a cookie-cutter blueprint of doing these events. As you know, you guys are using StreamYard, we're using Learn TV to do the player. Everything is pretty smooth, let's knock on wood. It's a live event so you never know exactly what's going to happen on that moment. But yeah, so we've got Windows, I got my screen up here. If you go to "Focusdotnetconf.net", Focus on Windows is happening on February 25th. I'm going to blow it, Leslie. This is recorded so by the time. [inaudible] >> Yeah, don't pay attention to the countdown here, it's a lie. >> The countdown is a little off you guys. >> Yeah. >> It's happening 15 days. >> Look at the date, not the countdown. >> We've got some speakers from the community and the product teams, so guys are all working on, you're making Windows desktop apps and Windows development awesome with.NET 5. You can see a little bit about what is.NET Conf here and you can check out our past events which I just walked through. All the content, the code, the slides, all the stuff that our speakers did in the past, you can grab here, and even the main event, this was the one you were mentioning at the beginning. That's the main.NET Conf 2020, go ahead and grab all the content there. But anyways, we've got a great lineup. We just announced, or just maybe published the agenda. I haven't actually announced it, this is my announcement right now. The agenda: We've got Scott Hunter and Olia. They're going to kick off the day with the Welcome Session, which is an hour-long session. We're actually building that, it's like the keynote. We're building that right now. I can't tell you-all the details because we're building it, but it's going to be pretty cool. We're going to focus a lot on the What's New in WinForms and WPF development on.NET 5. Then Cathy is going to come in there and she's going to talk about how to take your.NET Framework-based apps and get them to.NET Core/five. There's a tool we're working on to help you do that too. She'll walk through the preview of this tool. That's a little teaser on the slip out a little. We're going to have a little announcement there. Okay. So cool. Don't tell anybody. >> My lips are sealed. >> We figure we had a ton of what's new in C#. We do a lot of C# content because we know we have a lot of C# developers. We also have a lot of Visual Basic developers. So we said, you know what, on.NET 5, that we've done a lot of work in Visual Basic. To light up the Visual Basic framework, it has a whole development framework for building wind forms apps actually. Klaus, who actually used to be an MDP and now works for Microsoft, super passionate about Visual Basic, is going to be speaking with Kathleen Dollard on taking full advantage of Visual Basic and what's new for Visual Basic developers on.NET 5. So hopefully, that's an appreciated. >> Yeah. >> That's really cool, because I get questions about Visual Basic on my day job sometimes too. I'm like, "Oh, shoot." I feel like that's underrated language, but as like being used and it deserves more love. >> It's very close to my heart. People might know me from 20 years ago, I'm a huge developer. When I was hired by Microsoft, I was, a Visual Basic developer advocate and I definitely love VB, it will always be close to my heart. I don't really code anything anymore because I'm in marketing. Sam Basu from Progress is going to come in and show us how to use Azure SignalR service with your desktop apps. I think a lot of people think like signalR, it's a web real-time communications, web communications protocol. I don't need that from a desktop app. Sure, there's a lot of scenarios where desktop apps can take advantage of this as well. Your stock trading apps and those things that have really rich, rich UIs and or built native on native platform like Windows and can totally take advantage as well. He's going to talk to us about setting that up. The cool thing about Azure SignalR service is it's a total turnkey service. You don't have to host it or do anything yourself so that's really cool. Jessica Engstrom is a Windows Developer MVP and she is all about UX. She's going to talk to us about some UX principles and how as developers, we stroll and socket building great UIs, what we can do to build better UI, and usability in general. Then we have Dmitry, your friend, he's probably come and talk about- >> Yeah, I know Dmitry. >> He's basically the XAML tool guy. He's going to show us some of the new enhancements, NBS for billing XAML-based, WPF and UWP apps, and Visual Studio so this should be pretty cool. >> I'm going to pivot you for a second. Obviously, people should definitely check out this conference, especially if they're into Windows Apps and Windows desktop apps. But what if people want to be able to have a say in what the next focus conference events are, what should they do? >> That's a good point. How we usually do it is this one was based on feedback that we got from a survey that we did at the end of the last conference, the main event. We looked and saw, the people loved the main event, it was really good, good feedback from that event. But I saw some comments around it would've been nice to have more Windows content because it was really web heavy. I thought I looked back and I'm like, "Hey, we did a Blazer event, and we did Microservices, we did a mobile thing, but we haven't done anything for Windows developers." This was already pretty much based on the feedback that we got from the survey on the last event. I did say, you can add Beth Massi and I take that as feedback too. As the Executive Producer of.NET Conf, I do take feedback that way. But we also send a survey out, join that mailing list. So if you subscribe to notifications just down at the bottom here, that just puts you on a list that anytime we have another.NET Conf or a survey or asking for feedback, we just e-mail people and then they fill out the survey and then we know what to do. Then a lot of times, it coincides with something we're doing in the product too, like Blazer, for instance, was newly released at the time, Blazer's serverless, and we were working on the WebAssembly, so it's like right in between. We saw just a ton of people asking questions about it and how do I use this thing. We provide these scaling events. We just look and see what's the community doing and asking questions all up and then we pick. It has a lot to do with feedback but it also has a lot to do with marketing as well and where do we want to drive people next based on what the product is. Some of the things that I don't think other people know about Windows or at least WinForms and WPF is that they're open source. They'd been open-sourced for like over a year. So we're going to bring in some contributors from the WinForms and WPF projects to talk about how people could actually get started contributing in generals on GitHub or to those particular projects as well. It's not always like our shiny web technologies that are open source. Now Wind Forms is like 20 years old, the framework. To actually take something that wasn't initially ever meant as an open-source project to actually get it open source was actually an accomplishment in itself, and now see the community contribute to it is even more rewarding was put that way, so we'll have some of those books on as well. Take a look at the agenda, I hope that we've covered a lot. You'll see most of the content is about what you can do today, but we do have some future sessions. If we look at the end of the day, here we go. We're building.NET hybrid apps with Blazer. Dan Roth will come in and we'll talk a little bit about hybrid apps using their native apps that use web technologies. If you want to use more of a Webby syntax or Blazer syntax to do native development, he's going to show us where that's going and what it'll be like, the experience would be in like in.NET 6. We've got someone from the Windows team. [inaudible] about the project reunion. Project reunion is about making that experience a lot better and across all the different Windows 10 versions and basically building one app that can take advantage of all those devices. Then we'll have Maddie and David in to give us an update on the.NET multi-platform app UI,.NET MAUI, which is in Preview, actually by the time this airs, I think it'll be in Preview, one will be dropped. By the time we release in November, it's a new app model for building apps that not just mobile apps, but also desktop apps as well, all native applications using XAML. Hopefully, we'll have a good show for you. >> Yeah, that sounds great. Hopefully people go check out that site, get hyped about all the different talks on different ways and get involved with the community as a whole. >> Don't forget the swag. We did have free digital swag. Take a look at the swag. We've got free digital swag, we've got [inaudible] code theme, you can create your own little bot. We also have sponsors. Our sponsors are sponsoring a bunch of swag this time. This is the first time we're doing swag for a focus event. This was swag bag was really popular for the main event, and so our generous sponsors are donating 25 different prizes. You'll have a bag of stuff basically. You can enter to win right here. Especially the mystery prize pack. Apparently, Progress did that last time and they're like, people love the mystery part. >> I personally hated mystery surprise pack. I was like, I don't know what I'm getting myself into. I want to know what I'm going to get in, but it's each their own. >> I hope you get items in the stores and people can pick from more t-shirts and that kind off stuff too. Hopefully we make it fun. >> Awesome. February 25th is the magic date. >> Starting at 8:00 AM Pacific. >> Great. Thank you so much for coming and sharing that. I think that is super cool. I'm sure there's a lot of people out there who would love to have a full conference of nothing but Windows apps, both desktop and mobile and beyond. That's really exciting. >> Awesome. Thanks for having me. >> Remember February 25, don't look at the countdown on this video is wrong. >> Save the date. >> All right. With that, happy coding. [MUSIC]